older files from 1996

[CuriousG]

Greetings all,

I hate to resurrect such an old topic but I believe I may have a solution for this and wanted to make sure that others who may have had the problem or have the problem in the future can find a solution.

I just experienced the same problem (actually the files were from 1991-1992!). I knew the files were created with Illustrator, but they would not open. I even tried them on an old Mac Powerbook running System 8 with AI3! I took a look at them in a hex editor and found that my files also started with ABCD and had EPSFART3 in them. Searching on EPSF ART3 gave me a link to this post.

What I did notice on my old Mac Powerbook, is that the icons for these files was a little "DD". After some searching, I saw that this was "DiskDoubler" - a program that was used to compress files on older Macs. I remember now that when I created the files, they would not fit on a floppy (they were over 1.5 meg large), so I had to compress them.

After a bit more searching, I found a free app for OSX called "The Unarchiver". I changed the file names to have a ".dd" after them. It decompressed the files and VOILA! I'm able to open them with Preview and Adobe illustrator!

I hope that this information is useful to someone, someday. Or even perhaps the original poster!

Again, apologies for resurrecting such an old thread.

- George

[chevalier]

I had GIGs and GIGs of files as old as 1988 a few years ago that I had to bring into the modern realm. 80% of these were disk-double archives. I duplicated the entire directory then went folder by folder undisk-doubling on a PowerMac G3 with OS9. It took weeks of my spare time but in the end most of the files were salvageable. Some files were "hardware key" archived and were forever lost.

Shortly after this problem was resolved we instituted a policy of guaranteeing file integrity and edibility for a maximum of 5 years. If you hadn't made an order of the item in 5 years and it couldn't be retrieved you were charged for redesign. If you had ordered without changes we ate the cost of redesign as a gesture of good will. We also instituted a policy that if a file was edited it was to be brought up to the newest version of software - no matter how painful. We also stopped accepting Freehand files at that point - customers were required convert them to PDF. If any changes needed to be done beyond PitStop capability we rejected the files with correction instructions. You'd be amazed how many people STILL won't let go of Freehand.